It's this horrible crime that promotes Paul to the status of "Prisoner B" at the Hostile Activities Research Ministry, or HARM—in actuality a torture camp. There he is subjected to excruciating bodily and psychological—well, harm, to put it mildly. What's Paul's one refuge and retreat? Simple: He's been a disassociative kind of personality ever since youth, due to cerebral damage inflicted by his father's beatings. Now he begins to hallucinate an existence on another planet, Stygia, inhabiting the persona of one Fremant.

Stygia was ostensibly settled by a lone human starship at some point in our future, after Earth's civilization destroyed itself. It's a grim world whose many life forms all derive from insects. Humanity can still eke out a living, but they are hindered by one other factor: The colonists did not travel to this world as incarnate individuals. Rather, they were stored as quasi-biological personality templates that, upon landing, were decanted into new bodies. But the decanting went awry, and now the invaders are patchwork Frankenstein's monsters, at least mentally. They speak in a kind of Joycean cant, for instance, and have trouble with institutions such as democracy and religion. Of course, this hasn't stopped them from wiping out the native sentients, the Dogovers.

As Paul's senseless interrogation continues in London, Fremant embarks on his own quest for meaning, fighting both the planet and the short-sighted stupidity of his fellows.

A parable of man's inhumanity to man

This book easily ranks among Aldiss' finest works, a milestone achievement in a long and splendid career not yet over. It rings changes on many of his long-running themes, and it also cements itself firmly into the general SF canon.

On the front cover of this novel, the one former book of Aldiss' alluded to is Report on Probability A (1968), and that's no gratuitous reference. The scenes in the present day of Paul's incarceration ("Prisoner B" recalls the alphabetic monikers of the earlier book's characters) embody the transparent, objective, almost deracinated, repetitive, I-am-a-camera style of that earlier book. For instance, Paul's hazy focus on the fireplace that graces one room in an old mansion where he's tortured renders the scene as tangible as that outside the reader's window. Again, the lack of proper affect on the part of the interrogators echoes the earlier book, as does a multileveled ranking of observers (Stygia in this case, versus the voyeurs of Report).

But see how far we've come from 1968: Whereas Report supplemented its dreariness and stasis and paranoia with eroticism and the possibility of change for the better, now, in 2007, we have only cruel mortality and devolution. Yet perhaps, Aldiss hints, utopian 1968 was the anomaly and mankind's baseline condition is this naked agression and fear. The events on Stygia seem to say so as well.

The Stygian passages also play to the same world-building strengths that Aldiss exhibited in Hothouse (1962) and The Helliconia Trilogy (1982-85). And of course he's always been politically engaged, as a book like Super-State (2002) shows. So here we have Aldiss presenting us with a distillation of his wisdom, in very topical clothing.

But the book also echoes many classics by other writers. First off, of course, we turn to the many dystopian masterpieces (which Aldiss discusses in an appended interview, saving me the trouble of naming them again!). But there are also elements of Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker (1980) in the cracked stories the Stygians tell themselves, as well as Kornbluthian satire on the "Marching Morons" theme. The alien Dogovers could have come out of Michael Bishop's Transfigurations (1979), while the manner in which Paul/Fremant ends up on Stygia and that planet's nomenclature make us think of David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus (1920).

But I believe the main homage here is one that might go unnoticed. I'm thinking of Jack London's The Star Rover (1915), in which a prisoner's torture sends him on an astral journey.

In any case, Aldiss has succeeded in blending all these strains, personal and genre-related, into a deeply moving meditation on whether humanity can survive its own fallen nature or is doomed to devour itself.